Morilee Project
Overview
Morilee is a worldwide leading bridal dress company with many Debi Award winning designs in the Bridal, Bridesmaid, Prom, Quinceanera, and Social Occasion categories. They have 3 main websites (www.morilee.com, www.paparazziprom.com and www.vizcayadress.com) and 3 blogs (blog.morilee.com, blog.paparazziprom.com and blog.vizcayadress.com) that were needed to be updated with latest web-technologies to couple with modern web-design, performance, and security and optimized for the search engines. Besides these, they also needed lots of new functionalities in the Admin panel.
Morilee Lee awarded the task to MVI Solutions as we are a pioneer in the latest web-technologies. We have completely redesigned all their websites. The newly built website is fully responsive. Previously the website was using the Zend-1 framework which was outdated and vulnerable. We used the latest Drupal framework to rebuild their website. There were a couple of reason to choose Drupal over another framework. A few major reasons are, Drupal is open source, development is rapid, flexible, highly secure, and scalable. Drupal is highly regarded as one of the best website frameworks available and is used by 71 of the top 100 universities in the U.S., including MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and all of the Ivy League. It is also used for some of the U.S government websites including the official website of The White House. We have chosen WordPress for their blogs as WordPress is the world’s #1 CMS for blogging. Of course, we are also aware that WordPress is #1 target for the hackers as this is most commonly used. Hence, we have taken all necessary measures to make all the blogs secure.
This project had some challenging works. Firstly, our client wanted to have a central admin panel for all 3 websites from where they would be able to manage contents for all 3 websites. Besides contents, they wanted to have capabilities to manage all SEO related functions such as meta tags, title etc. to be controlled from the central admin panel. We made it happen using the multi-site feature of Drupal.
Secondly, after building the admin panel with new features and requirements, we had to migrate all the existing data from their current website to the new website. This includes migrating the current URL structure intact. They have thousands of dresses in different categories. We successfully migrated all data to the new database structure. As we kept the current URL structure as it is, there were no impacts on the site’s SEO or ranking of the site.
Thirdly, one of the requirements was to detect visitor’s Geo-Location and serve content according to that. For instance, when a visitor from Coral Springs, Florida, the USA looking for bridal stores visits the Store page, the website will automatically show name and details of the stores nearest to him/her. Same for the trunk shows. Additionally, when a visitor will go to a store detail page, the website will show the driving direction from his/her current location to that store. There are also radius-based search features available on the store and trunk show page.
Fourthly, we have implemented Zoomify features for the dress images, video on the featured category, auto-loading of dresses, trunk shows, stores etc. like the Facebook autoloader. This reduced the overall stress on the server and improved page loading time.
Additionally, we have implemented a full custom search feature on this site. This will allow the visitors to search for the dress code, colors etc. We built the site keeping all aspects of SEO in mind. The ranking of the site improved a lot after the new site was live. They have gained a lot more traffic than before. We also helped them with the Internet marketing. There is a special software module implemented on this site that automatically uploads new images from the site to their Pinterest and Google+ account. It increased interactions with the visitors.
Besides the programming, we are also hosting and managing their websites. We are using Google compute engine as hosting platform. We optimized the website and the server associated with all services for high speed. Morilee has a huge amount of traffic, so we had to design the whole system architecture of this hosting platform very carefully. We have used Varnish, APC, Memcache and optimized Apache and MySQL settings.
